If you’re interested to learn about tinnitus and the COVID-19 vaccine, I’m guessing that you’ve either already been vaccinated or you know someone who’s had a COVID vaccination and they’ve reported this ringing or buzzing in the ears, these sounds they’re hearing, which we refer to as tinnitus.
So first of all, medications, drugs, food, anything we put into our body affects people differently. So not everybody is getting tinnitus from the COVID vaccine, but some people are, and quite a significant number of people are reporting tinnitus after getting infected with COVID. This can be really distressing, really worrying, really bothersome for these people, especially if they’re told there’s no cure, to live with it, and that there’s nothing you can do. None of that is true. Tinnitus is reversible. You can return to normal. Tinnitus sounds in the body do come and go. In fact, they’re generated in our ears or between our ears and our brain in our hearing headquarters and the brain and tinnitus signals are traveling along neural pathways. The more we worry about them, the more we think about them, the more we talk about them. The more they annoy us and the more we’re emotionally connected to the tinnitus sounds, the more emphasis and oomph neural synchrony that the brain gives those sounds.
So a huge part of overcoming overriding and healing tinnitus is actually taking the no big deal approach and the perspective that “I’m safe, it’s okay, I can hear these sounds”. Now you might be like, “Well, why do I hear this sound now when I didn’t previously?” Tinnitus is something that can just come and go randomly in a person’s life, men, women, young, old, any culture, any ethnicity, it’s extremely common. In fact, nine in 10 people can hear their own body sounds, but perhaps only three to 30% are worried about it. So it’s normal to hear your body sounds, it’s not normal to focus on them and hate them.
So what we want to do is to change our relationship to the body sounds and understand that when I get the COVID vaccine, I’m actually asking my immune system to do more work. When our body is doing more biological work, when the immune system is more active, guess what? We create more internal body noise. You can almost think about it as a washing machine. When the washing machine is not on, it’s silent, right? There’s nothing going on, there’s no moving parts. But when we turn the washing machine on, we start to get noises because there’s water moving, there’s clothes being sloshed around. And then when it spins, it has a different sound again because it’s then got the spinning cycle. So when we eat, when we talk, when we relate to people, when we take drugs, when we get vaccinated, we’re actually changing the mechanics of our body and we’re therefore changing the noise that the body produces.
So I know for many of my clients, they find it really reassuring when they’re like, “Oh, okay, so this is a sign my immune system is working.” You’re actually hearing your immune system be more busy. You can override that tinnitus sound and you can filter it out and return back to your normal steady state of just hearing whatever you want to hear in the world by taking the no big deal approach, by not focusing on it, by not checking if it’s there, by not talking about it, by not trying to get rid of it. The more you try to get rid of it, the more you actually hardwire in the tinnitus sound and get the opposite effect.
Take a read of my book where I explain this in detail. This is Rock Steady, my book I published last year, it’s rereleasing in September this year. Rock Steady, it teaches you how to heal vertigo or tinnitus, both of these are invisible symptoms generated from the ears. And it teaches you how to do it using neuroplasticity, which means you learn how to reset, rewire and reestablish new neural maps that override your symptoms. So instead of hearing the tinnitus sounds, you actually learn to focus on building new neural pathways that feel and sound normal again. Visit seekingbalance.com.au to learn more about my book, Rock Steady.
